the panama warning

I have been re-reading some of John Le Carre's novels in preparation for tackling the new and comprehensive biography of the famous author, the first ever published. Because so much of Le Carre's work is peppered with biographic elements from his own life, I wanted to brush up on some of his books I had not read in a while.

So I recently finished another go-through of The Tailor of Panama, which I've read twice before, but it had been a few years. (I have read all of his books at least twice -- I'm obviously a fan.)

As soon as I started re-reading Panama again, I remembered something I had forgotten about it: the novel, first published in 1996, is eerily prescient of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In the Le Carre work, a British bespoke tailor named Harry living in Panama is extorted into becoming an MI6 sub-agent because he hears various political gossip in his fitting rooms. For a variety of reasons, he decides to embroider significantly the tidbits he hears to make them more salable and then begins to wholesale fabricate "intelligence" to keep the scam running.

What he does not know is the MI6 agent running him is also running a scam of his own, significantly gilding the already highly exaggerated and often fictional intelligence. Back in London, the Whitehall spooks are so excited about what they hear from Central America that they convince the Americans to join them in invading Panama and deposing the sitting government.

If you know anything about the American invasion of Iraq, you know it turned out to be much the same as the fictional Le Carre plot. An Iraqi huckster by the name of Ahmed Chalabi peddled dubious exaggerated intelligence to highly inexperienced but politically connected and hugely gullible American spooks looking for a reason to invade Iraq.

That, in turn, was significantly burnished and fluffed to establish justification for invading Iraq. In the process, the seasoned spooks who knew their way around Iraq and this suspected Chalabi's product was bogus were blatantly ignored.

Later, evidence surfaced suggesting that Chalabi may have been an agent of the Iranian government to sucker Americans into the war. That doesn't sound far-fetched, considering the Iraq invasion defeated Iran's bitterest enemy.

Le Carre's novel was adapted into a film in 2001, starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, and Jamie Lee Curtis, before the Iraq invasion. Perhaps someone should remake the adaptation sometime and call it The Tailor of Baghdad.